Harvest Unreaped

Weather: Some rain Sunday and Monday, but cold mornings continue to send signals of changes coming. Last rain, 10/9.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, Maximilian sunflowers, pampas grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leather leaf globe mallow, purple asters.

In my yard: Large leafed soapwort, calamintha, winecup mallow, chocolate flowers, anthemis, blanket flower, French marigolds, chrysanthemums.

Bedding plants: Wax begonias, sweet alyssum.

Inside: Zonal geraniums, moss roses.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, goldfinches in the Maximilian sunflowers, geckoes, ants.

Weekly update: This is just not a self-perpetuating fruit area, despite the many apricot and apple trees. Bees may have been imported to fertilize the flowers, but there are few animals to spread the seed by eating the fruit.

Even natives like junipers don’t always have their berries plucked.

But what’s a plant to do when its bounty dries on the vine or twig?

Apples shrug off their fruit to save themselves from carrying the extra weight into winter. I don’t know if apples behave like the watermelons described by William Weaver that nurture their seeds inside their moist wombs. In the past, when apples were pressed for cider, the unused debris was thrown away. Ian Merwin said, seedlings "sprouted naturally in pomace piles." Saplings certain seem to appear wherever they can begin undetected.

My neighbor’s Russian olive has a different strategy: it throws off the fruits with a few leaves to help them fly away a bit. One landed in my drive this past week. I’m not sure how all the others I cut down got here.

The buffalo gourd down the road uses gravity. It’s growing at the top of a road cut where it’s vine tumble down the bank. The fruit accumulates at the bottom. One must have rolled across the road, and on down the slight grade to lodge in the grass around a fence. On the other side is an active hay field, whose owner cannot be happy to have to worry about its fruit infesting his bales.

Notes:
Merwin, Ian A. "Apple Tree Rootstocks," Cornell University website, summer 1999.

Weaver, William. His observations on watermelon were discussed in the post for 30 August 2015.

Photographs:
1. Pyracantha berries are eaten in other parts of the country, but never here. Ones in town, 4 October 2016.

2. Privet berries are also neglected here; 5 October 2016.

3. Juniper berries in my yard, 5 October 2016.

4. Sand cherries drying on the twig in my yard, 5 October 2016.

5. Apples fallen in a nearby orchard, 4 October 2016.

6. Russian olives in my drive, 5 October 2016.

7. Young buffalo gourd vine hidden in the grass near a hay field, 4 October 2016.

Growing Corn

Weather: Snow last Sunday was so fine, it didn’t accumulate in masses. Still it lingered in the shadows for several days, protected by afternoon temperatures that didn’t reach 32 degrees, then by high clouds.

Mornings are now so cloudless the effects of the sun are not mitigated and dawn temperatures average 20 degrees. Cold probably is killing any tender perennials like snapdragons that might have wintered over.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae, piñon, other evergreens, yuccas; leaves on bearded iris, vinca, sweet pea, violet, golden-spur columbine, beards tongues, hollyhock, winecup mallow, alfilerillo, purple aster; needle, June and other grasses.

What’s gray: Four-wing salt bushes, winterfat, snow-in-summer; buddleia and catmint leaves blue gray.

What’s reddened: Cholla, young twigs on peach and apricot; new buds visible on peach.

What’s yellowed: Young stems on globe willow; leaves on fernbush and bouncing Bess yellowing.

What’s blooming indoors: Sun comes in low this time of year for blooming zonal geraniums on inside porch that faces southeast.

Animal sightings: Hopefully cold temperatures are killing off the insects and vermin that survived last winter. There were so many grasshoppers and aphids this past summer from the previous warm winter, it would be a disaster next summer if everything survived.

Weekly update: Our image of Native American farming methods was set by people living in New England. Every year around Thanksgiving the same information is reiterated for a new generation. Darrett Rutman recapitulates:

"They set grains of seed corn into the center of each circle...Here and there along the coast the women fertilized the corn by setting a small herringlike fish, the alewife, with the seed...As the first corn shoots broke the surface a few weeks after planting, the women descended on the fields again, carefully planting three of four bean seeds around the young corn. Corn and beans grew together, the beans climbing on the cornstalks. Sometimes squash and pumpkin seeds were planted in the hills, their vines trailing across the uncultivated land between."

Today, Native Seed, a seed collective in Tucson, tells local bean growers to "plant with corn & squash."

When people actually looked at farmers in the Southwest in the late nineteenth century, that’s not what they were doing. For one thing, among the Hopi, cultivation is divided by gender. For another, First Mesa is at 5700' with annual precipitation averaging 8" to 12" a year. Plymouth Plantation lies on the Atlantic Ocean. It’s at 34' with more than 52" of precipitation a year. It’s ten degrees hotter in the summer in Arizona than in Massachusetts.

The Hopi are matrilocal, which means the women controlled the homes and the springs that irrigated small gardens. Men had jurisdiction over clan kivas and agricultural fields away from the village. Men planted part of the corn crop in the main washes below the mesas that would get flood water during summer monsoons. They grew the other under cliffs where water seeped down. Two locations with two water sources provided security against erratic weather.

Alfred Whiting says men at Oraibi leaned the modern irrigation techniques they used at Moenkopi from the Mormons of Tuba City. They founded the village in a wash as a summer camp in 1870 about 40 miles from Third Mesa. The Mormons arrived in 1875.

Beans might have been grown in lines between the corn rows, but Whiting said, more often men planted them on mesa tops in 1935. They also planted peach orchards in the dunes under the cliffs.

Women had small gardens they watered by hand from their springs. They grew squash, gourds, musk melons and introduced plants like chili, onions, and tomatoes. The dye plants, sunflowers and red amaranth, usually grew in the women’s plots, but sometimes could be found in a corner of a bean field. Other useful wild plants like Rocky Mountain bee weed, devil’s claw and wild potato were left where they volunteered in corn fields.

The method for planting corn was the same in both the Northeast and Southwest. Instead of the long, continuous rows of Midwestern farmers, small circles were cleared about six feet a part.

Walter Hough indicated the Hopi used a planting stick with a wedge point to dig holes where they dropped seed: 6 to 12 kernels in a good field, more in a bad. Whiting added, the foot-deep holes were filled during the season as the plants grew.

No mention has been made of fertilizer in the Southwest. In February they cleared brush and releveled fields.. In April, Alexander Stephen noted they planted rabbit bush. Ericameria nauseosus grows about 6' tall. The shrub blocked winds that uncovered seeds that were planted more shallowly than corn. Elsie Clews Parsons said the men of Oraibi used greasewood fences around their watermelon patches.

The other trait shared between the Northeast and Southwest is the chronological history of crops. Squash was domesticated first, then corn was introduced. Beans came later. In the Northeast, the three merged. Roger Williams recorded the Narragansett of Rhode Island believed in "Kautantowwit. The great south-west god, to whose house all souls go, and from whom came their corn and beans."

In the Southwest, where the climate was different, the crops were kept separate. Corn and beans each had its own set of ceremonies within the annual ritual agricultural cycle.

Notes:
Hough, Walter. "The Hopi Indian Collection in the United States National Museum," U. S. National Museum Proceedings 54:235-296:1918.

Native Seed/SEARCH. "Planting and Harvesting in the Low Desert," double-sided, single-page guide included with orders.

Parsons, Elsie Clews. Hopi and Zuñi Ceremonialism, 1933.

Rutman, Darrett B. Husbandmen of Plymouth, 1967.

Stephen, Alexander. Notebooks, 1882-1894, edited as Hopi Journal, 1936, by Elsie Clews Parsons.

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939.

Williams, Roger. In James D. Knowles, Memoirs of Roger Williams, The Founder Of The State Of Rhode-Island, 1834.

Photographs: Different ways sweet corn is grown in the immediate area. For more on nostalgic corn planting, see post for 23 November 2008.

1. Corn possibly grown for farmer’s market; field is planted every few years, with ditch at the back; 9 July 2010.

2. Corn possibly grown for market; field was planted in cantaloups a few years before; ditch is at the back and has lateral on one side; 12 July 2012.

3. Corn grown in a few rows at the back of the house land, 17 August 2012; variations in height reflect differences in flow of water from ditch in back.

4. Corn grown in a few rows at the side of the house land, 13 September 2013.

5. Corn grown along side the house land, ditch in front, 22 October 2014.

6. Corn grown in widely spaced rows in field separated from house land, ditch in front; 12 July 2012.

7. Corn growing in raised bed at end of trailer; earlier annual four o’clocks were blooming at the base; I’m not sure if this was planted this year, or reseeded last summer; 15 October 2014.

8. Corn grown in opening in a wood lot, 22 November 2011; I think it’s planted every few years and comes back on its own in the intervening seasons.

9. In comparison, field corn grown as commercial crop in Michigan, summer of 1982. With modern seeds and picking machines, corn was planted more densely than it was when I was a child.

Recent Hopi Pigments I

Weather: Rain last Sunday, followed by frost on the car windows in the mornings.

What’s blooming: Tansy, purple asters; Siberian elm and beauty bush leaves turning yellow.

Animal sightings: Grasshoppers, large and small black ants.

Weekly update: Hopi ceramic craftsmanship declined after the Spanish introduced iron pots and, later, cheap china. They stopped burning the coal that had produced the hard pottery, and returned to wood. Some speculate the introduction of steel axes facilitated that change.

Alexander Stephen, a Scots trained in metallurgy at Edinburgh, was living near Walpi on First Mesa in the 1880s. Jesse Walter Fewkes, who led the southwestern archeological expedition sponsored by Mary Tileson Hemenway from 1889 to 1894, apparently suggested he keep notes. Stephen’s interest naturally included the use of minerals.

While he was in Arizona, archaeologists were reconstructing fourteenth-century pottery. Collectors, and later tourists, wanted pieces. This stimulated Hopi craftsmen to recreate the older designs, and in some cases, to replicate older processes. Stephen mentioned visiting the "old pottery fire pits" in 1893 with a potter and her husband. They asked him to identify useful lodes of coal.

The previous year he had watched pottery fired with sheep dung and corn cobs. They added bones of sheep, cattle or deer, which turned white when burned, to add "this quality of whiteness to the pottery" that high heat once had provided. "Bones of horse or burro are not used. These would darken the pottery."

He noted the paste was covered with a clay slip and decorated with red, brown, and yellow ochres. The brown turned maroon, the yellow a pale red when fired two to four hours.

He noted elsewhere, black came from black iron ore or tansy mustard. Barbara Freire-Marreco saw women at Hano, the Tewa-speaking pueblo on First Mesa, steam bundles of Descurainia pinnata in a pit oven in 1912, then press and dry the liquid for later use. She said, women used it as a trade good among themselves. Walter Hough said it was turned into an oily mixture that served as a binder with an iron pigment for pottery.

The primary uses for paint by men were for their bodies, prayer sticks, kachina masks, and other ceremonial objects. Most of the pigments were the same as those used in the kiva murals in the fifteenth century, but their sources may have changed.

With improved, though still rudimentary roads, they could obtain more from Grand Canyon. Their legends identified the plateau fissure as the place from whence they emerged onto the surface of the planet.

Ralph Cameron and Pete Berry claimed copper deposits along Horseshoe Canyon that were mined between 1890 and 1907. They exploited existing trails of the Havasupai, also known as the Ko’honino or Coconino, who lived on Cataract Creek. The company’s detritus may not have been commercial grade, but it still was rich in copper compounds.

Both blue and green were used by the Hopi. Stephen found men clearly recognized differences in hues, but their language combined them, leading to confusion. It may be because they still used forms of copper, which could vary from sample to sample. Azurite is unstable when exposed to air; water replaces some of its carbon dioxide, turning it into malachite. If the water or saliva used in Hopi pigments contained salt, it would have had the same effect on azurite.

In 1893, Stephen was told they gathered the blue and green malachite used on prayer sticks from the Ko’honino plateau.

They made a light blue for masks from copper carbonate, boiled piñon gum, and squash seeds. They did not use boiled binders for prayer sticks, only clear spring water or white bean meal and saliva. Both men and women used an easily ground, blue-green, copper-stained sandstone, mixed with water, on their bodies. He noted some were experimenting with adding a little aniline blue or green dye.

For weaving, which was the responsibility of men, they mixed indigo with warm, aged urine. For baskets, women used blue beans or Mexican indigo, according to Alfred Whiting.

Indigofera suffruticosa is native to the Mexican lowlands of Guerrero, and was being used as a colorant before Columbus. The Spanish developed an export industry in the 1500s, and it still was a major agricultural product in Chiapas, Colima, Guerrero, Jalisco, Michoacán, and Oaxaca in the 1890s.

Notes: Some information from Wikipedia.

Freire-Marreco, Barbara, William Wilfred Robbins, and John Peabody Harrington. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Hough, Walter. "The Hopi in Relation to the Plant Environment," The American Anthropologist 10:33-44:1897.

Stephen, Alexander. Notebooks, 1882-1894, edited as Hopi Journal, 1936, by Elsie Clews Parsons.

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi (1939).

Photographs: The Hopi collected their pigments from great distances. Grand Canyon is at least 150 miles away. If one wanted to make pigments where I live, one would have to do the same. Sedimentary rocks were more likely to yield pigments, conglomerates the crystals and other gem stones used in rituals.

1. La Bajada Hill southwest of Santa Fé, 35 miles from my house; Chinle Formation red-brown sedimentary mudstone.

2. Red granite in driveway gravel taken from quarry west of Río Grande, maybe 8 miles away; stones originally came from Picuris area, 40 miles to the northeast. Granite often includes pink feldspar, white quartz, and black mica.

3. Rio Puerco west of Albuquerque, 136 miles away; redeposited grains of yellow sandstone from Navajo Draw Member, Arroyo Ojito Formation.

4. Yellow-stained stone, driveway gravel.

 

5. Los Barrancos west of Rte 285 and south of Española, 5 miles way; one of the white ash beds.

6. White quartz and a red/white/black piece of granite, driveway gravel.

7. Rio Oso northwest of Española, 14 miles away; first rains after Las Conchas Fire sent black water that covered the river bottom; photograph taken 28 August 2011.

8. No pure black or blue stones in driveway gravel, but many shades and types of gray; also see background stones in other drive pictures.

9. Deformed fault east of Dixon, less than 35 miles away; black shale hardened into slate.

10. White, yellow, and pink quartz, driveway gravel.

Buffalo Gourd

What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, cholla, Russian sage, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, fern-leaf and bigleaf globemallows, alfalfa, white and yellow sweet clover, oxalis, wild licorice, stickleaf, tumble mustard, velvetweed, white evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, scarlet gaura, bindweed, milkweed, buffalo gourd, bachelor buttons, purple coneflower, goat’s beard, hawkweed, wild lettuce, local dandelion, Hopi tea, hairy golden aster, native sunflower, blue grama grass.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Dr. Huey rose, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, butterfly weed, yellow flax, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat; catalpa pods forming.
Looking east: Floribunda rose, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, snow-in-summer, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, pink veronica, pink salvia, tomatillo, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, rock rose, pink evening primrose; buds on sedum.
Looking south: Blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid roses, Illinois bundle flower, sweet pea, daylily; more raspberries ripening.
Looking west: Lilies, purple beardtongue, Rumanian sage, catmint, ladybells, perennial four o’clock, flax, speedwell, purple ice plant, white spurge, sea lavender; buds on Shasta daisy.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, bougainvillea.
Animal sightings: Quail with young, woodpecker on utility pole, green hummingbird on coral beardtongue, cricket in the house, bees on catmint, aphids, ants and grasshoppers.
Weather: Finally some rain Thursday, but the unwatered land is 2" of dry sand over bone dry dirt; 15:49 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Some moisture moved through and the more xeric weeds have already responded. Now comes the buzz of small motors, soon to be followed by the smell of rotting vegetation.
One neighbor who’s half acre is covered by the previous owner’s pigweed periodically levels it to a lumpy carpet. Never mind pigweed, ragweed and Russian thistle all put out growth shorter than the weed whacker’s spool that quietly goes to seed for next year.
Another neighbor thinks a chain saw’s the answer to the Siberian elm and Russian olive that got past him. Every year or so he goes out, leaves a pile of brush for the rodents, and complains when the suckers come back.
Farther down the road, someone’s been trying to kill a buffalo gourd for years. All that’s happened is the vine moved from the center of the barbed-wire fence to a space between the corner post and a concrete block support. The white taproots can reach six feet and survive temperatures below -10 to come back when temperatures range between 68 and 86.
The upturned grey leaves crown his bank like meringue and cascade down the side like tiers of upswept roofs on an east Asian temple. When anything’s so conspicuous and so hard to kill, people ask what good is it.
Certainly not to eat. The gourd’s yellow-flesh may resemble squash, but the body rejects its bitter chemicals. In the early twentieth century, some Santa Clara told Smithsonian researchers they mixed finely ground pogoje root in cold water for a laxative. When Michael Moore tested traditional lore, he found only two people who’d ever tried it and both gave him such piteous looks he warns against its use. Perhaps that’s why the Paiute and Shoshoni restrict it to venereal diseases.
If it’s a member of the gourd family and can’t be eaten, the next guess of many is that it’s a rattle. A Tesuque woman told Gail Tierney and William Dunmire it can’t be used for dances: the skin’s too thin and doesn’t dry right. They tried and found she was right. The person who told L. S. M. Curtin the Navajo made special efforts to take gourds back from Peña Blanca may have been deliberately maligning a traditional enemy.
The plant’s so foul, people have reasoned it should be useful as an insecticide. A Cochiti elder crushed the gourd in water and used the liquid to repel squash bugs, while Albuquerque master gardeners have heard it’s enough to drape a vine over the fence. Unfortunately, it whets the appetites of cucumber beetles.
The vegetation also contains the saponins traditionally used for soap. Curtin found local Spanish-speaking women rubbed calabazilla gourds on wooden floors to remove grease while Dunmire and Tierney report Cochiti women used chunks to scrub pots and Sandia used them for clothes.
Carolyn Niethammer has obviously tried this because she warns the nearly invisible hairs on the striped green gourds become thorny when they dry and suggests her readers may need to put their clothes through several rinses. Perhaps that’s why the Kiowa and Mahuna mention it for hides and buckskins.
Still, people continue to look for uses for this habitue of fence rows and railroad tracks; it offends our sense of harmony with nature to think it’s only a geegaw of the gods. William Bemis spent years trying to raise Cucurbita foetidissima for animal feed because the seeds are 30-65% protein and their oil contains linoleic and oleic acids. The more intensely he grew them, the fewer seeds they produced.
Barry Goldstein tried promoting the starchy roots as an ethanol crop for eastern New Mexico, while several have patented insect traps that use the bitter cucurbitacins to lure insects to a more deadly poison. Since some of those terpenoid compounds found in other plants have shown they might fight cancer, researchers are analyzing the buffalo gourd chemicals to see if any might be useful. So far none report encouraging results, but the search continues.
I suspect all my neighbor wants are suggestions on how to remove it from his yard. It may repel squash bugs and tempt cucumber beetles, but it doesn’t do anything for pigweed. And, it stinks.
Notes:
Albuquerque Master Gardeners. "How Can I Get Rid of Squash Bugs?", available on-line.Bemis, William P. Discussed by Anson E. Thompson, "Arid-land Industrial Crops" in J. Janick and J.E. Simon, Advances in New Crops, 1990, available on-line.Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with notes by Michael Moore.Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995, includes Cochiti, Sandia, and Tesuque.Goldstein, Barry. "Technical and Economical Feasibility of Buffalo Gourd as a Novel Energy Crop," 1988.Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database includes Edith Van Allen Murphey, Indian Uses of Native Plants, 1959 (Shoshoni); John Bruno Romero, The Botanical Lore of the California Indians, 1954 (Mahuna); Percy Train, James R. Henrichs and W. Andrew Archer, Medicinal Uses of Plants by Indian Tribes of Nevada, 1941 (Paiute, Shoshoni); and Paul A. Vestal and Richard Evans Schultes, The Economic Botany of the Kiowa Indians, 1939.Niethammer, Carolyn. American Indian Cooking: Recipes from the South West, 1999.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Photograph: Buffalo gourd down the road, 28 June 2008.

Squash

What’s blooming in the area: Roses, cholla, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, rose of Sharon, sweet peas, Russian sage, datura, purple phlox, bindweed, white sweet clover, white evening primrose, English plantain, toothed spurge, Queen Anne’s lace, bachelor button, zinnia, Tahokia daisy, first sunflowers, áñil del muerto, golden hairy aster, paper flower, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native dandelion, horseweed, wild lettuce; catalpa pods; corn, tomatoes, chili, onions, squash and other foot high green crops in vegetable patches that are not identifiable from road; local produce stand advertising cherries and peas.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature roses, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, butterfly weed, squash, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemums.
Looking east: Small and large-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, sweet alyssum, pink salvia, veronica, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, California and Shirley poppies.
Looking south: Tamarix, morning glory, daylily, tomatilla, cosmos
Looking west: Lilies, flax, catmint, white spurge, caryopteris, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Monch aster, purple coneflower.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold, tomatoes.
Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium
Animal sightings: Gecko, pair of quail, smaller green hummingbirds, group of yellow-bellied birds, bees, hummingbird moths, ants, aphids, grasshoppers, crickets, squash bug, black widow spiders, Japanese beetles on yellow evening primrose plants, insects too small to name; gopher destroyed roots of baptista and two hollyhocks.
Weather: Hot, but some rain Thursday after midnight; mornings cool; plants still dying along the road, but established trees and shrubs growing.
Weekly update: My squash is producing its first flowers, all males. Luckily, they are the reason I put in seeds. If I depended on the females to bear fruit, I’d starve.
Every time I came home this summer to leaves wilted in the heat, I wondered if they would get this far and pondered the fragility of agricultural life in this corner of the world where people stopped putting in corn a few years ago when it was so dry and, before that, a neighbor told me the only thing grasshoppers weren’t eating were his tomatoes and cucumbers. Corn plots are back this year, but not my neighbor’s front garden.
Times have been hard before. During the depression, frost habitually killed half the peach crop in Santa Cruz, and apricots survived one year in four. In Chimayó, the wheat harvest of 1934 wasn’t sufficient to provide seed for the next year, and they never attempted beans or squash because of the "bug pest."
Farther back, when Francisco Dominguez visited the area in 1776, locusts had been ravaging crops for five years. At San Ildefonso, those who searched for wild food found little, and their neighbors were chary of charity or trade. He reported they had become "cautious" and fear had "hardened their hearts."
Nothing is as stark as the prehistoric Guaje ruin on the Pajarito plateau where the elements uncovered bones that were thin and porous from chronic malnutrition and calcium deficiency.
People didn’t leave here in the 1930's because they discovered cash would stave off starvation if they changed their diet. With the great drought between 1276 and 1299, Anasazi abandoned dryland farming in the highlands east of the continental divide for irrigated crops along rivers.
Who knows what drove the ancients to experiment with plants. The earliest remains of domesticated Cucurbita pepo have been found in a cave in Oaxaca from some ten thousand years ago, four millennia before corn appeared there. Then it was prized for its seeds which contain lutein, carotene and beta carotene; the edible layer evolved later.
Squash, including pumpkins, was important to the pueblo peoples who abandoned the Colorado and Pajarito plateaus. To the west the Hopi roasted the seeds, sliced the meat to dry for winter, and used the blossoms for soup. Here, the Santa Clara boiled or baked the mesocarp in a bread oven.
Cucurbis became more than food; they became a symbol for how people ward off hunger. Families to the west clustered themselves into matrilineal organizations, including the Acoma and Hopi pumpkin clans. Along the rio arriba, the Tewa formed two groups, the summer squash people, who governed during the growing season when fish could be eaten and wild foods gathered, and the winter turquoise people, who ruled when families lived on stored foods and hunted big game.
Squash is also more than dinner to people whose Spanish-speaking parents were the ones who first entered the cash economy offered by the national laboratory. They may not grow it much themselves, but they remember the taste of calabaza. It’s one of the few words that cannot be translated any more than can the pleasant childhood associations of life free of worry.
Notes:Domínguez, Francisco Atansio. Republished 1956 as The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, translated and edited by Eleanor B. Adams and Angélico Chávez.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Smith, Bruce D. "The Initial Domestication of Cucurbita pepo in the Americas 10,000 Years Ago," Science 276:932-934:1997.
Stuart, David E. "Cliff Palaces and Kivas: From Mesa Verdeto Bandelier," Glimpses of the Ancient Southwest, 1985.
US Dept of Interior. Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939, cited in Dan Moerman’s Native American Ethnobotany database.

Photograph: Male squash blossoms, 8 July 2007.